Virtual Jaguar libretro

Atari Jaguar, everywhere RetroArch runs.

68000, Tom, Jerry, two RISC coprocessors, the Object Processor, the CD drive, the link port, the modem. One core, 16 CI-built platforms.

Download Compatibility Enhancements

Cybermorph gameplay captured in the core: the ship in transit over a dark horizon, cockpit HUD below
Cybermorph, in-core capture, true colour on.

System

Platforms built per release
16
Processors emulated
4 + BUTCH
Savestate format (all older ones load)
v12
Licence
GPLv3

What ships

Jaguar CD

CUE/BIN, CDI and CHD. Boots through an HLE CD BIOS or through the real BIOS on emulated BUTCH hardware. Audio CDs and the VLM work. CHD needs a session-aware chdman; every release attaches one.

per-title matrix · v3.0.0 notes

Controllers

ST and Amiga mouse in all three wirings, the Tempest 2000 rotary, the TR10 analog and driving protocol, the port-1 lightgun. Dead zone, offset and response are tunable per axis on every analog source. The Team Tap and the Pro Controller are not emulated.

epic #428 · v3.4.0 notes

Link play

JagLink and CatBox serial, at register level. Automatic mode rides a RetroArch netplay session with nothing to type. Direct TCP finds LAN hosts by UDP beacon and lists them by name. Doom deathmatch is validated. Ultra Vortek dials the emulated Voice Modem: press 911 at the title screen.

user guide · voice-modem.md

Savestates

Byte-identical replay under RetroArch's run-ahead loop, checked by a harness rather than asserted.

PR #327 · the test

RetroAchievements

Memory maps and achievement support, asserted in CI against the rcheevos mapping.

test_memory_map.c · test_rcheevos_e2e.sh

GameDrive

16 MB bank switching against RetroHQ's GDBIOS bindings. GD-locked homebrew boots.

v3.1.0 notes · interface notes

Memory Track

The CD unit's save cartridge, emulated. CD saves persist.

memory-track.md · PR #259

HD textures

Dump every unique blit source as a hashed PNG, redraw it, drop it in a pack directory. Replacement is presentation only. Savestates and netplay stay bit-identical with or without a pack.

texture-dump.md · #369

ROM patches

Cartridge softpatching (IPS and friends, applied by the frontend) works out of the box, and a curated catalogue documents target CRCs. CD images load by path and are not softpatched.

rom-patches.md

Boot ROM

Series K or Model M, both embedded, or a custom image identified by checksum. An unrecognized 128 KB image still loads, with a log warning.

v3.4.0 notes

Crash watchdog

Failure signatures land in the frontend log, naming the subsystem that broke.

crash_detect.c

Source

GPLv3, descended from Shamus Hammons' Virtual Jaguar. Hardware-referenced tests gate CI.

licence · acid suite

Release log

VersionWhat landedNotes
v3.4.0 The peripheral wave: mouse, rotary, analog, driving, lightgun. Ultra Vortek netplay over the emulated Voice Modem. Self-configuring link with LAN discovery. Texture dump and replacement. Boot-ROM selection. CHD. v3.4.0
v3.3.0 Hi-res completion: RGB16 renderer, scaled-sprite and CLUT supersampling. Val d’Isère ground fix, taken from the Flare netlists. Run-ahead determinism. v3.3.0
v3.2.0 True-colour rendering. 2x internal resolution with blit supersampling. Raiden and Power Drive Rally fixes. v3.2.0
v3.1.0 GameDrive. Clock scales. Audio CD and VLM. Savestate compatibility. v3.1.0

Nightlies build on every push to develop, currently v3.6.1. They are gated on compiling, not on the test suite.

Installing on Linux, a Raspberry Pi or macOS? tools/install.sh finds your frontend by reading RetroArch’s own libretro_directory, works out which build you need, backs up the core it replaces and verifies the new one loads. It can also keep itself updated. 

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/libretro/virtualjaguar-libretro/develop/tools/install.sh | sh

Add --dry-run to see the plan without changing anything, --list to just show what it found, or --channel nightly for the bleeding edge. Release builds are named by board and word size — rpi4 is 32-bit, rpi4_64 is 64-bit — and choosing by uname -m gets it wrong on the many Pi setups running a 64-bit kernel with a 32-bit userland. The core has to match RetroArch, not the kernel, so the script reads the word size out of the RetroArch binary and refuses rather than guesses when they disagree.

Documentation and support

The manual is the official libretro documentation: core options, controls, file extensions. No BIOS files are required (README: BIOS).

Reports go in Discussions, confirmed bugs in Issues. Attach the frontend log: the crash watchdog writes the failure signature into it.